By Rhys Saunders
The State Journal- Register
SPRINGFIELD, Ill. — Personnel cuts and a virtual hiring freeze ensure the Springfield Fire Department’s longtime lack of diversity won’t improve anytime soon.
It’s a problem described as “pretty commonplace” statewide by the head of the Illinois Fire Chiefs Association.
Cecil Taborn Jr. is one of two of 209 Springfield firefighters who is black. That’s less than 1 percent — even worse than the percentage in the police department, where the chief, Robert Williams, who is black, last month announced a Lincoln Land Community College initiative aimed at recruiting more black officers.
Twelve of Springfield’s 260 police officers are black.
Taborn, 37, who has been with the Springfield Fire Department since 1999, said he’s tried recruiting prospective minority firefighters and knows how difficult it can be.
“I’ve gone out to recruit, and people will come up to ask me about the job, then the pay and then shifts,” he said. “I think people have a misconception about the fire department because people think we’re just running into a burning building.”
The job entails much more than that, he said, and therein lies part of the problem. The training today is more extensive and difficult, which narrows the field of poten tial hires.
A beginning firefighter makes about $44,000, though the department hasn’t hired any since November 2007.
No racial tension
Taborn said he believes the department is serious about its efforts to recruit more minorities but that those efforts have been put on hold in the midst of the city’s budget crisis.
He says he’s never experienced any racial tension within the department.
“It doesn’t come into play,” he said. “I’ve had people ask me, ‘Why aren’t there more women or more blacks on the department?’ and I don’t know the answer to that.”
Phillip Johnson, 33, the other black city firefighter, has been with the department since 2005. He said taking the job was initially daunting.
“I was approached by the NAACP, and everybody was making a big deal about it,” he said. “When I first started working there, it was in the forefront of my mind, but it’s been almost five years now and I haven’t experienced any sort of discrimination.”
Archie Lawrence, president of the Springfield chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, said those discussions five years ago were part of an effort to help the city recruit more minorities.
“We were trying at that time to get more African-Americans on the fire department,” Lawrence said. “We were recruiting as many people as we could get. We were trying to work with the city to find a better way to recruit.
“We also expressed our disappointment with (the fire department’s) recruitment efforts.”
Johnson said he, too, is perplexed as to why the firefighter minority numbers aren’t higher.
“As far as why it’s hard to get young African-Americans to take this test and get the job, I don’t know,” Johnson said. “I’ve been singing its praises everywhere I go. It is a problem, and I would like to have more young black men on the job.”
No money for hiring
About 100 city and City Water, Light and Power employees were laid off at the end of February. Those layoffs included 17 firefighters.
Ernie Slottag, the city’s communications director, called the need for more diversity “a large priority,” but said there are no plans to hire new firefighters in the foreseeable future.
“The problem is we’re not hiring at all,” he said. “The soonest we’d be testing is next year.”
Slottag added that there is no money in this year’s budget to pay for testing to create a new civil service hiring list.
Fire Chief John Kulek said a four-year hiring-eligibility list, which includes several minority candidates the department would like to hire, expires in January 2011.
“The sad part is we’ve had minorities on that list who we hoped to hire, and the economy went south,” said Kulek, who took over as chief in 2006. “We just haven’t had a chance to get them hired.
“We still have some candidates on that list, and it’s a problem of getting the funding to hire them. I’ve spent a lot of time on this thing, and it gets frustrating after a while. We’d like to see something break on this because we’ve been working on this during the four years I’ve been here.”
A statewide issue
Kulek isn’t alone in his struggle to recruit minorities, according to Tim Sashko, president of the Illinois Fire Chiefs Association.
“I think it’s probably pretty commonplace across most of the state,” Sashko said. “Historically, these were jobs that didn’t require a lot of training up front; you applied for a civil service test, you got hired and you trained. The career has really evolved over the last 30 years.”
During the 1950s and ‘60s, firefighting did consist of mostly putting out fires and running into burning buildings, he said. Because of that, the training was less taxing, inexpensive and often available after firefighters were hired.
Now, it’s a whole different ballgame.
Firefighters also have to be trained as emergency medical technicians and paramedics. They’re often the first on scene to a medical call, and require a great deal of training before they start the job.
That training is more extensive and difficult, which narrows the field of potential hires.
“What you find is the level of education and accessibility of that education has created an interesting dynamic,” Sashko said. “Most of that training and skills to that base is no different than collegiate requirements for jobs, and all that training has to be done in advance of that employment.”
“It’s no longer that I can be John Doe off the street, take a civil service test and get the job.”
What’s the solution?
Fire departments statewide are looking for solutions to increase their minority numbers.
The question has also been raised as to who is responsible to provide added benefits to minority groups that may be at a disadvantage in accessing the type of education and training required prior to employment, Sashko said.
“How do you reach out to minorities and say, ‘I’ve got to get you the medical education and everything else?’” he asked. “That’s a huge shift, because we’re not doing it for anybody. We’ve been working on a hiring-list process at a statewide level to try to create better accessibility.”
Locally, efforts to improve fire department diversity are at a standstill, Kulek said.
“It’s 100 percent based on the economy, how quickly that turns around and if grants come around,” he said. “Grants may be our best bet to hire soon.”
The department has applied for the federal Safer Grant, which would allow the department to hire new recruits or rehire firefighters who have been laid off because of the city’s budget troubles.
If the grant comes through, the department could get 15 more firefighters.
“We’d be happy if we could get half of that number,” Kulek said. “It’s so competitive (for funds) around the country right now. Every city and every state is hurting.”
Lawrence said he believes the fire department needs to be more aggressive in its recruiting practices.
“First of all, I think that there has to be more money put in to try to recruit,” he said. “They’ve shown some effort, but when the bottom fell out of the economy, everything went away. We would hope they would be more assertive, and we will try to ensure that that happens.”
Rhys Saunders can be reached at 788-1521.
Daughter’s death inspires a man to become firefighter
Phillip Johnson never thought he’d be a firefighter
It wasn’t until Sept. 6, 2003, that he knew what he wanted to do. It was the day that changed his life, and also one that he will always remember as the worst day of his life.
“My daughter ... we had an accident in the driveway, and she ended up dying from it,” Johnson recalled. “The truck slipped out of gear and hit her, and we had to call 911.”
Mya Johnson was 14 months old when she died after the pickup rolled over her in the driveway of the family home in the 2500 block of West Lawrence Avenue.
Phillip Johnson was loading the pickup for a trip to the recycling center that evening. The only person in the truck’s cab was Mya’s sister, who was about 3 years old at the time.
“Firefighters were the first to respond,” Johnson said. “We brought her into the house, and they took control of the situation and got me out of the house so they could do their job.”
After that day, he was a changed man forever, Johnson said.
“When I saw them coming out of my house with my little girl, trying to keep her alive... I felt they were doing everything they could to keep my little girl with me,” he said. “I had all kinds of thoughts swirling through my head. I wanted to be like them.”
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